Week 50 of 2009

I had planned to publish this weekly report Monday but I thought I would just update a few web pages first. I then thought I would tidy up a few form classes fronting some data type classes before finishing changes to one of those pages. Now here we are and its Wednesday! I miss the discipline of working in a team reporting to someone who is always in a hurry.

Anyway, I have started checking my model classes against Version 0.05 of the OOA Interchange Format DTD and noting differences from the previous version. I've also started updating the change log on the main OOA Interchange Format page. I will also shortly be updating the change log in the OOA Tool Read Me detailing overall differences from the previous build. It's been so long since the last build was released I can't even remember what it looked like! I will continue to update these change logs until the next build is released now.

I spent most of the week in the Data Type subsystem since data types were poorly supported in the last build but are fully supported in the next build. This work is now complete except in relation to data type operators which is really part of the Operation subsystem. The only type of data type that is not supported is Composed Type which is discussed in [xtUML02]. Maybe I will add it in the future if I see a good justification for supporting it.

I also updated my References page to include the new book Model-Driven Development with Executable UML by Dragan Milicev [OOISUML09] which I bought from Amazon. It is a very meaty read (786 pages) and I have only just started to read it. Definitely a job to do while relaxing in a Coffee shop. The book discusses a new executable UML profile which it calls OOIS UML. I have yet to find a single mention of xtUML or xUML which is a bit disappointing. Obviously the author didn't want to be associated with any of this work. Dragan Milicev is based out of Belgrade and English probably isn't his first language. Yet, the text book is written in clear plain English (unlike some foreign text books). The author also presents his arguments in a logical incremental way which I like. Don't be put off by the fact that either the author or the publisher thought that the best way to market the book was to stick a big picture of the author on the book's cover! That might be a good strategy if the author was a nice looking lady since most of it's readers would be male but I'm not sure it was a good idea in this case. Anyway, once I have read more of the book, I will give a more complete review.